Now that’s a really horrifying use of “homeopathy” – that haha medical “treatment” that takes care to wash away every trace of the active ingredient.

It’s insulting on top of recklessly endangering, charging $15.99 for a tiny amount of water. But the reckless endangerment is the horrifying part. Asthma can kill! How can a “spray” with no active ingredient offer any kind of relief, temporary or otherwise, for asthma symptoms? It’s not going to shrink the swollen inflamed airways, so what relief can it offer?

It’s criminal.… Read the rest

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The BBC reports that 27 Nobel laureates have written an open letter to Putin about his disgusting law against “homosexual propaganda.”

Leading figures including novelist JM Coetzee signed the letter, devised by Sir Ian and chemist Sir Harry Kroto and given to The Independent.

I heard this story on the World Service last night, including Harry Kroto reading from the letter. That was exciting, because I’ve shared a dinner table with Harry Kroto. He was at CFI’s Moving Secularism Forward conference in Orlando two years ago – and gave a very exciting and thrilling talk.

Sir Harry Kroto said he had “enjoyed the tremendous friendship of Russian scientists” during numerous visits, but had seriously considered cancelling his next trip, an

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There was a conversation on RTE the other day, a conversation which touched on homophobia; the video of the conversation was taken down from YouTube and then restored with parts removed.

RTE has removed content from the RTE Player featuring Rory O’Neill’s interview on The Saturday Night Show.

In an interview following a performance by O’Neill’s alter ego Panti, host Brendan O’Connor spoke to the performer about homophobia in Ireland. O’Neill spoke about how he believed Ireland had a bad rep but as a small country could change much faster.

Nothing too horrifying there. He goes on to say that everybody knows gay people, which makes it hard to “be mean” about the subject.

Because Ireland is such

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Gnu Atheism on the pope:

 … Read the rest

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Another one. From the New York Times:

A federal judge in Oklahoma ruled Tuesday that the state’s constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage violated the federal Constitution, the latest in a string of legal victories for gay rights and one that occurred in the heart of the Bible Belt.

The state’s ban on marriage by gay and lesbian couples is “an arbitrary, irrational exclusion of just one class of Oklahoma citizens from a governmental benefit,” wrote Judge Terence C. Kern of United States District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma, in Tulsa, deciding a case that had languished for nine years. The amendment, he said, is based on “moral disapproval” and does not advance the state’s asserted interests in

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The ever so much more nice guy pope has pitched a big fit about women having the audacity to terminate their pregnancies.

He said it was was “frightful” to think about early pregnancy terminations.

Easy for him, isn’t it. It’s not his life that will be messed up and perhaps irreparably thrown off course by an unwanted pregnancy. He can afford to drool sentimentally over a process inside someone else’s body that he chooses to think of as a “baby” or even a “child.”

“It is horrific even to think that there are children, victims of abortion, who will never see the light of day,” he said in part of the speech that addressed the rights of children around the

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Yup.

… Read the rest

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An Oklahoma Bill from 2009, HOUSE BILL 1330.

An Act relating to the state capital and Capitol Building; providing for legislative findings; creating the Ten Commandments Monument Display Act; authorizing the placement of a monument displaying and honoring the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the Oklahoma State Capitol; authorizing the Secretary of State to work with certain persons in designing a monument; providing for the location for the monument; authorizing the Attorney General to defend certain challenges; providing for codification providing for noncodification; and providing an effective date.

Stupid. There shouldn’t be such a monument. It’s a horrible theocratic set of “commandments” and it doesn’t belong anywhere near any government buildings.

The ten. Protestant version.

I. Thou shalt

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Originally a comment by Irène Delse on More on the Big Questions.

Let me be the token French citizen and resident, here, and clarify a few misconceptions.

1) There is no general ban on the hidjab in France. There simply is not. Maybe Ms. Sahar al-Faifi was thinking of a recent law (enacted under the former president, right-wing leader N. Sarkozy) against the wearing of full-face veils, like niqab or burqa, in public spaces. (Wether this confusion was an honest mistake or deliberately done in order to generate F.U.D. about “islamophobia”, now, is another question.)

2) This law is a can of worms, that much is true. It was crafted as a way to combat Islamist (mostly Salafist) … Read the rest

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A letter to Farida Shaheed, Special Rapporteur in the Field of Cultural Rights at the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, from Radha Bhatt, Marieme Helie Lucas, Nahla Mahmoud, Chris Moos, Maryam Namazie, Pragna Patel, Abhishek Phadnis, and Fatou Sow. They write to draw her attention to the increasing incidence of gender segregation on public university campuses in the United Kingdom, and to seek her intervention in the matter.

Gender segregation reinforces negative views about women, undermines their right to participate in public life on equal terms with men and disproportionately impedes women from ethnic and religious minorities, whose rights to education and gender equality are already imperilled.

Speaking of that…it’s very damn unfortunate that the … Read the rest

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A young guy from Afghanistan has been granted asylum on the grounds of his non-belief in “God” (or, specifically in his case, in “Allah”), This is believed to be a first.

The Afghan was brought up as a Muslim and fled the conflict in his native country. He arrived in the UK in 2007, aged 16. He was initially given temporary leave to remain until 2013 but during his time in England gradually turned to atheism.

Enough said. He can’t go back to Afghanistan in that condition, now can he.

[His lawyers] helped him submit his claim to the Home Office under the UN’s 1951 refugee convention, arguing that if he returned to Afghanistan he would face persecution on the

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Ten minutes in. The woman in the niqab is Sahar al-Faifi, a community organizer and geneticist (the caption says). She says the big question assumes there is a conflict between religious rights and human rights and there is no such conflict. Same-sex marriage is totally impermissible in Islam, she says; that is agreed upon.

But it doesn’t mean for me to actually project my belief into my action allowing myself to discriminate against them. So that’s, that’s – you know, the human rights and the religious rights are in align. There is no conflict between the two.

See what she did there? She completely contradicted herself. She said there is no conflict, and then she promptly described a conflict. Same-sex … Read the rest

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Never never be born a girl in Afghanistan. Never.

A girl who says she is nine years old was captured at a checkpoint in Afghanistan wearing a suicide vest. The BBC reports her story as she told it.

It was late evening, the mullah was calling for prayers and my brother took me outside and told me to put on this vest. He showed me how to operate it, and I said: “I can’t – what if it doesn’t work?” And he said: ‘It will, don’t worry.’

I was scared and he took the vest back from me and he hit me hard, and I felt scared. Then [he gave me back the vest and] left me near the checkpoint

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From last week, the BBC reports another political murder in northwest Pakistan.

On a hot and humid night in late August, a small group quietly scales the wall of a mud-brick house in a village near Pakistan’s north-western town of Akora Khatak.

In the dim, starlit courtyard, they make out the figures of a man and a woman lying in two separate charpoy cots, sleeping. About 15 minutes later, they walk out through the main door, leaving the couple in pools of blood.

So we know roughly what’s coming. The two were of the “wrong” family or ethnic group or caste for each other; or the woman had been ordered to marry someone else; or the woman’s younger brother … Read the rest

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And in Mauritania – another journalist, another criticism of Mo, another “apostasy” claim, another potential death sentence. “Mo is the best thing ever and if you deny it we’ll kill you!” Well that sure convinces me.

A young journalist in Mauritania faces a possible death sentence after being convicted of apostasy for an article criticising the prophet Mohammed, AFP reported Monday (January 6th).

Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mohamed was arrested January 2nd in Nouadhibou and “was convicted of lack of respect for the prophet”, a judicial source told AFP.

And then the private sector got involved.

In Nouadhibou, a businessman even offered up money to anyone willing to kill Ould Mohamed.

In describing the January 3rd incident, Nouadhibou-based journalist Mostafa

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Via Yemisi - Gay Cameroonian, Roger Jean-Claude Mbédé, imprisoned for sending love text message to same-sex person, dies.

That’s appalling.

He was sent to prison in March 2011 for sending a text message declaring his love for another adult human.  The message was a simple “I’m very much in love with you”. How does such a message constitute harm? Why should this lead to imprisonment?

Cameroonian activist, Lambert Lamda, said Mbédé had been out of hospital for about a month before he died and had received no medical care during that period.  ’”His family said they were going to remove the homosexuality which is in him. I went to see him in his village. He could

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Here are Chris and Abhishek on the BBC show The Big Questions. The question, you will remember, was “Should human rights always outweigh religious rights?”

There’s also Tina Beattie, and a guy called Davis Mac-Iyalla saying yes they should, and (I skipped ahead) hot disagreement about (male) circumcision.

I skipped all the way ahead to get to the Chris and Abhishek part at about 50 minutes. They unzipped their jackets as requested to reveal the (shock-horror) Jesus and Mo T shirts.

Do they have the right to wear such T shirts? No, the woman in a hijab sitting (reluctantly) next to them says. No, another woman in a hijab in the back row says. “When you’re threatening our religion,” she … Read the rest

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